Slicing Up Naples

I ask little of the great cities of Italy, no more than a few admirable trattorias scattered among the unheated museums, crumbling amphitheaters and heroic statues with no noses. I’m content if the polenta is creamy, the Gorgonzola pungent, the artichokes tiny and fried just right. Is it wrong for me to want tasty bolognese sauce in Bologna or savory Genoa salami in Genoa? Simple though these needs may be, in-town dining in Italy rarely works out for me. Whenever I’m there savoring a magnificent meal, I can usually look out the window of the restaurant and see an old farmer in a pilled cardigan chugging by on his tractor. A mule stumbling along under sacks of arborio rice won’t be far behind.

We all know Italian cuisine is the food of the home kitchen and, absent that, of the simple country restaurant with the wife at the stove and the husband out front, greeting guests and pretending he is the reason the place is doing so well. It is a cuisine of freshness and simplicity, which is seldom the strength of formal restaurants, yet that is not a satisfactory excuse for Italian food to suffer so acutely when exposed to the trappings of urbanity. After all, a restaurant owner has only to hire somebody with a fast car, of which there is no shortage in Italy, and instruct him to fill the trunk with ripe tomatoes, zucchini flowers and artisanal sausages and drive in from the country once a day. He must also marry a stout woman who grew up in a household in which the mother cooked for the family, and there are plenty of those around, too.

Now and then, I have enjoyed meals in Italian cities. I love the wines at Don Lisander in Milan, the fish at da Fiore in Venice and everything at Cibrèo in Florence (except the congealed calf’s foot, and I don’t have to apologize for disliking that). I’ve spent a total of four to five months in Italy in my lifetime, and while I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for those travel opportunities, few of my dining experiences away from the countryside have been memorable. There is much to recommend about Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome and Bologna, but restaurants aren’t among their virtues.

I’ve spent most of my time in the northern cities, but I’m gradually wending my way south. Most recently, I veered off toward Naples, an undertaking that had me buoyant with optimism. It is by reputation the birthplace of the red-sauce cuisine that defined Italian food for Americans throughout most of the twentieth century. Even better, the pizza of Naples is legendary, admired everywhere as the benchmark of the genre, even by citizens of northern Italy, who almost never speak of the people or the products of the south without a curled lip and a sneer of contempt. (It’s mostly a work-ethic thing.) In Naples I would find pizza from wood-burning ovens, pizza sold in the shadows of perilous alleys, pizza that would expose as a cruel joke the pies we Americans have been eating all our lives.

Furthermore, I was thrilled to be visiting a city filled with the resplendence and detritus of history. Naples is a glorious relic, the most densely populated city of Europe, survivor of conquests by the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Byzantines and the Normans. Naples was harried by the runaway slave Spartacus, placed under siege by the Germans, attacked from the sea by the Saracens, harassed by the Vandals, tormented by the Franks, forced into an alliance with the Sicilians and, to hurdle a few centuries, bombed by the Allies. (It caught a much needed break when Sophia Loren was born there in 1934.) The Spanish, starting with Ferdinand and Isabella, ruled Naples for more than 200 years, and under the influence of the Spanish and Bourbon kings the cuisine of Naples began to evolve, helped along by the influx of New World foods such as the tomato, the bean and the pepper.

Naples is the base of the dreaded crime organization known by the old Spanish name camorra, far more insidious-sounding than Mafia, which reeks of ineptness. In Naples I would learn if street crime and spaghetti go hand in hand, as American filmmakers would have us believe. I would gaze upon the killer volcano Vesuvius, destroyer of entire civilizations; walk dangerous alleys hung with ominous flapping laundry; inhale the sweet woodsmoke of pizza ovens mingled with the sooty residue of everyday life. I eagerly awaited my visit, for I have wearied of visiting cities so civil even the subways are safe at night.

The taxi driver bringing me in from the airport excitedly pointed out the soccer stadium where Diego Maradona starred for Napoli in the 1980s, yet another reminder that whatever the century, Naples is forever living in the past. I told him I knew a man who knew Pelé, which must have impressed him, because he failed to overcharge me for the trip. In the course of several excursions to the airport to collect my wife and some friends, all lured to Naples by promises of superb traditional dining, I deciphered the system of extortion employed by drivers plying the airport-midtown circuit. They demand two to three times the fare registered on the meter, and should the victim protest, they offer a receipt that is four to five times what is on the meter. This way the driver cheats the passenger, the passenger cheats his company, and everybody prospers by participating in a satisfying life of petty crime. I had booked a room at the Grand Hotel Parker’s, which is halfway up a series of winding hillside roads from the Bay of Naples. Technically, Parker’s is in Vomero, a middle-class residential area located at the top of a hill that until a few generations ago was parkland and countryside. These days Vomero has the same amount of green space as the rest of the city, virtually none. My room overlooked the harbor, one of the world’s great vistas, and I must admit that waking up every morning to such a view made the trip worthwhile, even if the restaurants, as I was soon to learn, did not. A welcoming gift in my room was a wad-paper bag of sfogliatelle, the world-class ricotta-and-dried-fruit pastry of Naples that manages to be crunchy, buttery, silken and chewy at the same time.

For a good part of my life, I’d looked forward to dining in Naples. I’d dreamed of it the way lovers fantasize about Paris, scholars about Heidelberg and romantics about Venice. There is no more evocative smell to me than Pecorino Romano, the grated cheese that gently floated down upon every pasta dish served to me in the South Philadelphia restaurants of my youth. Words such as cacciatore (cooked in mushrooms, onions and tomatoes) and saltimbocca (sautéed with ham) are as emotionally appealing to me as any gastronomic terms, and I have always considered red-sauce cooking the food least likely to let me down. Back in the 1970s, when I was a sportswriter and traveled to major cities without identifiable restaurants, I always knew I could count on places named Luigi’s and Mama’s to serve up satisfying plates of chicken alla scarpariello with rigatoni alla marinara on the side.

I hoped to visit a dozen restaurants during my ten days in Naples. I went to only five, and I left early, dismayed. I tried five pizzerias too, and I quit on them after uncovering an awful secret: There are puddles in the pies, little lagoons of hot liquid that soak through the otherwise magnificent crusts. As troubling as I found this to be, it didn’t shatter my confidence nearly as much as two restaurant meals I experienced soon after my arrival. Even a couple of nice pieces of fish in the days before my evacuation—which is how I started to think of it—couldn’t make me change my mind about the essential undesirability of Naples restaurants.

The first dinner was at a quietly fashionable spot called Ciro a Santa Brigida, near Via Toledo, the fashionable shopping street Neapolitans like to call Via Roma. Ciro a Santa Brigida looks just right: nice tablecloths, simple wood furniture, the ambience of an establishment promising excellence without pretension. A friend and I stepped inside and were immediately shown to a tiny table in a cramped passageway next to a window overlooking a taxi stand. Our waiter, who spoke decent English, discouraged us from having anything we requested, including the seafood stew that is the house specialty.

I ordered a bottle of wine. He shook his head at the poor choice. “You like dry?“ he asked. “Sure,“ I replied rather sourly. He didn’t notice my distress, but Italian waiters never do. He brought us a wine called Asprinio di Aversa, which was dry all right. Perhaps it was the power of suggestion, but the flavorless, flinty wine seemed to leave a chalky film on my tongue, much like an unswallowed aspirin tablet.

I insisted on the gnocchi alla napoletana—to the waiter’s credit, he warned me against it—because it sounded so right, so perfect for my very first dish in Naples. The gnocchi were gummy, probably store-bought, and the sauce was dull, not much more than canned tomatoes. We were offered no grated cheese, and when I asked why, the waiter replied, “I didn’t know you wanted it.“ Never before had I come upon an Italian waiter mystified by the time-honored concept of cheese on tomato sauce. I insisted on the stew, which contained squid, octopus, mussels and shrimp in an oily, garlicky sauce. I liked it well enough, although the shrimp were cooked to mush, which I subsequently found standard in cucina napoletana. My friend’s grilled orata, a harmless local fish of minimal distinction, wasn’t fresh. An arugula salad was served soaking wet, and the leaves were too tough to chew.

It was a poor excuse for a meal, but worse awaited. I had been advised by several heretofore trustworthy friends that Dante e Beatrice served traditional food untouched by time, and I looked forward to dining there more than at any other restaurant. After all, I had come to learn about the foundation of the Italian American food that had sustained me for so long. My initial impression of Dante e Beatrice, like that of Ciro a Santa Brigida, was that it seemed just right. It’s a tiny spot of two small rooms, with family photos on the pale yellow walls and no frills except a guitar player whose discordant refrains turned out to be a perfect accompaniment to the cuisine.

The moment the five of us were seated, a waiter brought out a slice of something he called pizza rustica, a sweet-and-savory ricotta cake laced with bits of ham. It was so appealing I was thrown off guard. When he suggested that he select our appetizers, I happily agreed. Out came eleven dishes, as fast as he could fling them on the table. The marinated yellow peppers were fine, and the carrots weren’t too bad, although I can’t say carrots take all that well to a long soak in vinegar. The other dishes were so outside the parameters of what I would call appetizing, I couldn’t believe they were part of a cuisine that had established an unshakable foothold in the United States. Most were so overly marinated that my tongue shriveled on contact. The white beans were blessedly acid-free, but they were cold, bland and mushy, the only inedible white beans I’d ever been served in Italy. The mozzarella was sour, but highly desirable compared to the marinated unidentifiable vegetable jerky, which in turn soared over the marinated small smelly fish.

I lunged for a menu. Listed was “tender roast veal.“ That sounded like a lifesaver, but my pleas were ignored. The waiter presented unordered rubbery rigatoni in an insipid tomato sauce. We picked at the pasta, and then I cried out, “Finito, finito!“ What I thought was a universal wail of distress accidentally turned out to be perfect Italian, but it had no effect. The cook came to our table carrying an oversize skillet. “Special! Fried spaghetti,“ he proclaimed. I sagged at the announcement, but gamely replied, “OK, but finito after that.“ The fried spaghetti was crunchy. There was nothing more to it. Then the waiter rolled out a serving table groaning under the weight of diverse animal products, most unidentifiable. We barely muffled our shrieks. The long, bony things were stringy, and the fatty rolled things were tough. The meatballs had been cooked so long they were totally dried out, and yet, in a kind of perverse tour de force, they were cold.

There was more, as our futile finitos faded into hoarse whispers. Bitter, bitter greens. Some fruit nobody touched. Finally, a frosty pitcher of ice-cold limoncello, a local liqueur usually offered complimentarily after a meal. Here it was reminiscent of lemon-flavored dishwashing detergent, and it was on the bill. In fact, everybody was charged for every course, whether the unwanted food was touched or not. In an effort to pad the check even more, a mandatory tip was added on. It is impossible to recover fully from that kind of gastronomic body blow. What made it worse was that the wretched Dante e Beatrice, surely the worst restaurant in Italy, had been touted to me as a place that would exquisitely guide me toward a greater understanding of the cuisine I had come to explore. I was stunned. I finally understood why Spartacus was always so mad.

And I had yet to visit the pizzeria that would double my bill.

The pizzas of Naples emerge from ancient wood-burning ovens smoky, charred and puffy around the edges. Although thin, the crusts are supple and chewy, not cracker-crisp like those on the thin-crust pizzas of America. The cheese is mozzarella, either fior di latte, which is made from cow’s milk, or mozzarella di bufala, made from the milk of the water buffalo. The cow’s-milk mozzarella is as good as the best mozzarella in America, but the mozzarella from the water buffalo is unsurpassed—creamy, tangy and complex. (On the two occasions I ate buffalo mozzarella in restaurants—not pizzerias—it was nearly inedible.) The tomato sauce used on Naples pizzas isn’t much different from the tomato sauce in America, although occasionally chopped fresh tomatoes are added to good effect. The pizzas cost almost nothing, maybe $3.50 for a whole pizza marinara (oregano-laced tomato sauce, chopped fresh garlic) that overflows an oversize dinner plate. I noticed that the women of Naples were able to handle their outlandishly large servings by leaving the wonderful outer crust untouched, an observation I passed on to Letizia Tancredi, the front-office manager at the Grand Hotel Parker’s. She and I debated restaurants every morning. I would stumble into the lobby, shaking my head in dismay, and the debriefings would commence. When I mentioned to her that women were wasting the best part of their pizzas, she huffed, “We do not!“ It was a rare instance in the course of many delightful culinary conversations that she was a person of few words.

When I presented her with my far more disturbing discovery about the wetness of the pizzas, she did not flinch. At Trianon, one of the oldest and best pizzerias in Naples, my wife had looked up in dismay from her tasty if fatally gooey pizza margherita con bufala (buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, basil, Parmigiano-Reggiano) and said, “It’s soup.“ This was an exaggeration, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to see small children with tiny boats floating them across their pizzas, reenacting Columbus sailing toward the edge of the world.

Tancredi shrugged off this disturbing flaw as irrelevant, although she did not deny its existence. “I like wet,“ she said. “That’s because I dip the round [the outer crust] in the middle, where it is wet. We dip a lot in Naples. When we eat pasta, we dip the bread in the sauce. I have three babies, and they all dip. My husband dips. We dip a lot in our house.“

After nearly twenty pizzas, I figured out what made them so wet: everything. The cooks of Naples are generous with oil, and a lot of vegetable (not olive) oil is poured onto each pizza before it is baked. Mozzarella has a high water content, and so do crushed tomatoes. Add up all that liquid and what you get is a puddle in your pizza. Trianon, which had the most flavorful pizzas in Naples, also had the wettest. The even-more-famous Brandi, which has a photograph of Chelsea Clinton on its wall, made medium-wet pizzas. It also made the worst pizza margherita, which was unfortunate, since the restaurant claims to have invented the pizza margherita to honor a visit by the Italian queen Margherita in 1889. If Queen Margherita were around today, she wouldn’t be pleased. A lesser-known pizzeria, Luigi Lombardi a Santa Chiara, made admirable specialty pizzas topped with mushrooms or lightly smoked provolone cheese. We had a wonderful waiter there by the name of Ciro, but don’t bother asking for him, because half the waiters in Naples are named Ciro.

The place that brazenly cheated us was Pizzeria da Mimí, on Via Speranzella in the heart of the Spanish Quarter, which slopes up from Via Toledo and was built in the sixteenth century to garrison troops. A friend and I decided to explore the narrow, uneven streets, despite having been told the area was dangerous to outsiders. We feared nothing, although I have no idea why. Via Concordia, which cuts through the Spanish Quarter, is allegedly the principal habitat of the foot soldiers of the camorra. As we strolled by the stand of an elderly fruit peddler who spoke only a few words of English, he waved us over to talk about his visit to New York City decades earlier when he sailed with the Italian merchant marine. Then he warned us to get out for our own good.

The Spanish Quarter reminded me of Boston’s North End, particularly the shrewd efforts by residents to reserve parking spaces in front of their tenement buildings. One particularly resourceful woman had placed two clothes-drying racks filled with wet laundry on the street, end to end, filling a space just large enough for a car. About the time her husband returned, the clothes would be dry (if grimy from passing traffic). The code of the Curba Nostra—Our Parking Space—is inviolate in this section of Naples. Mimí is on nobody’s list of the best pizzerias in Naples, but my friend and I sought it out after hearing that it attracted authentic citizenry, not tourists like us. The place isn’t much to see: wobbly tables, a hideous fake-stone vinyl floor and architecturally freaky walls with tile on the bottom half and wood up top. My friend and I took one of the seven tables in the back room and ordered two Cokes and one pizza to share. Almost all the regulars were drinking Cokes from bottles. Ours came in holiday promotional cans decorated with pictures of Santa Claus. Clearly, outdated inventory was being unloaded on unwelcome guests.

Service was agonizingly slow, and not only for us. One elderly lady called over a waiter wearing a white baseball cap with BRONX on it and said, “Today?“ The pizza margherita, when we finally got it, was about the same as the other margherita pizzas we’d been eating. Then we were handed a bill that was twice what it should have been. When I demanded an explanation, the waiter said, “Service charge.“ I paid up, figuring we were being punished for trespassing in a section of the city where tourists aren’t wanted. Somebody had to teach us a lesson, and Pizzeria da Mimí did it well.

Near the end of the trip, with my spirits plunging, I decided on an act of desperation: I made a reservation at the only restaurant in Naples awarded a star by Michelin, the French guide that likes to put its inspectors in countries where they don’t belong. Italian chefs who cultivate the approval of the powerful Michelin guide invariably cease refining their own culinary traditions and begin duplicating unnatural acts of French gastronomy, which is why their restaurants invariably disappoint. La Cantinella is located near a strip of delu hotel properties, across from the harbor. It has the make-believe Polynesian-paradise look of a chic Hollywood club from the ’50s: bamboo walls, bamboo chairbacks and tiki-style tin lamps hanging from the ceiling. An orange-beaked tropical bird chirps away in the foyer.

The night I was there with my wife, the clientele was mostly well-dressed businessmen, and they all seemed to be eating fried-fish platters washed down with tannic red Tuscan wines. I ordered one dish that had genuine finesse, an appetizer of chilled seafood mid with baby arugula leaves in a light lemon sauce. I didn’t like anything else, including an appetizer of overly smoked swordfish slivers, my wife’s main course of baked fish and potatoes immersed in what I suspected was their cooking liquid, and a stunningly bad main course called Fantasia di Fritture. This turned out to be a collection of unappetizing miniature fish dumped from a deep-frying basket onto a plate from a considerable height. Garnishes did not exist, except for the powdered sugar sprinkled on dessert plates containing cakes not worth mentioning.

Service until then had been mechanical, but after dessert we were ignored. Waiters wandered by. Waiters wandered away. None looked at us. After a half hour, I suggested to my wife that we get up to leave, a generally infallible means of persuading a restaurant to bring the check. We slowly made our way to the cloakroom, tipped the coat-check girl—the only female staff presence in most Naples restaurants—strode by the bird (which also ignored us) and walked out the door. I expected to hear footsteps, but nobody came after us. The next morning, I returned to the restaurant to pay, and the son of the owner could not have been more charming or more apologetic. I learned something from this encounter. The people of Naples are at their best after altercations, win or lose. Most of the taxi drivers I refused to overpay were much friendlier after our arguments than before.

I did enjoy two restaurant meals in Naples. One was at a deceptively simple waterfront spot, Ciro a Mergellina, a large, airy, glass-enclosed structure across from a stretch of waterfront kiosks where almost all of Naples gathers to eat gelato on Sunday nights. The grilled fish was fresh and perfectly cooked, and the pizza emerged charred from a genuine wood-burning oven. Most restaurants in Naples that serve pizza use electric ovens, which means their crusts have the texture of wallboard, exactly the way we like it in America. Ciro a Mergellina stays busy until well after midnight, and the scene is engrossing. Beefy young guys who should be named Sal or Rocco (and would be in South Philly) waddle in to eat with one another, and suave older guys who look like Vittorio Gassman strut in escorting girls who look as if they should be in parochial school.

I also admired the dining room of Parker’s, which had virtues I did not find elsewhere: a panoramic view of the harbor and a chef with talent. Vincenzo Bacioterracino’s complimentary starter, a stuffed fresh anchovy on a bed of escarole, was the finest dish I ate in Naples. His whole baked turbot with capers, a few halved plum tomatoes and an olive or two arrived at the table in a shiny copper pan, a presentation that La Cantinella would do well to emulate. My wife and I shared one dessert, a three-tiered apple puff pastry with cinnamon ice cream, which was good enough to convince me that Giuseppe Salvati—the same man who made the sfogliatelle left in our room—is the best pastry chef in the city. The flaw of this restaurant is an eccentric menu that flip-flops between ancient recipes and inspirational cuisine to the point where ordering a coherent meal is not easily done.

Two more points about the restaurants and pizzerias. First, they generally have wretched wine lists, with many of the listed bottles not in stock. This doesn’t necessarily detract from a meal, for I was often relieved when a waiter returned to the table to explain that the mediocre wine I had reluctantly ordered wasn’t available. Second, the restaurants have wonderfully thick, soft tablecloths, most of them pristine white but some in comforting shades of light yellow or pale green. The restaurants of Naples can proudly boast the finest tablecloths in the world.

What I realized, after a week in Naples, was how much I loved being there, except when I was going out to eat. Everywhere I wandered, I saw or felt something that made me think of another place, a side effect of a city bursting with history. The high-rises on the hills reminded me of Hong Kong; the crumbling stucco villas, of Old Havana. I never felt threatened or uncomfortable, even when I was traversing the narrowest footstep-echoing alleys or challenging the surly staff at Pizzeria da Mimí. I enjoyed walking around Naples, an activity that could only have been more pleasurable had the sidewalks been passable. The better neighborhoods have a dog-poop problem of Parisian proportions, and elsewhere the pavements are blocked with illegally parked cars. I invariably walked in the streets, which is a challenge, since the drivers are criminally indifferent to pedestrians. Now and then, I would duck into one of the magnificent Baroque churches to offer a small donation in thanks for not becoming a traffic fatality. The police, for all I know, are the darlings of Interpol, regular Eliot Nesses, but they appear to do nothing except stand around in clumps and reminisce about Maradona’s debut against Verona in 1984.

I used to think Bologna had the worst restaurants in Italy, but Naples deserves the title. I suppose I should be disheartened, considering I had arrived with such high expectations, but I am not giving up my quest to find an Italian metropolis with acceptable eating establishments. There remains one more major city on my itinerary—Palermo, the urban heart of Sicily.

I’ve heard wonderful things about the food of Palermo. As I understand it, the port area is paved with trattorias that offer still-writhing fish from which one might select a fine lunch. I recently read that the sautéed breaded veal chops “in the style of Palermo“ are unsurpassed, and I’ve long wished to try a few cassata siciliana, the famous molded pastries rolled in almond paste. Yes, I’m sure Palermo is the answer. It has to be. The next city south is Tripoli, and I’m not going there to eat.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.